Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Wednesday, January 13, 2016

A Call for Moderation and Reflection

“The
highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.”(Ludwig Feuerbach)

In
Cologne, Germany on New Years Eve, some 1,000 men of ‘Arab - North African’
appearance attacked female revelers and to date well over 500 criminal
complaints concerning sexual assault and in some cases, rape, have been
reported.Similar incidences may not
have been as quantitatively ‘significant’ elsewhere but are known to have
occurred throughout Europe.We are losing the battle for our human rights
because the assumption of universally applied responsibilities does not exist
and therefore the application of equal rights is similarly trivialized.

It
is only correct that we constantly debate the balance between the Big Brother
state and civil rights but protection of the individual as a cultural principle
has not kept up with human rights.Thanks
to the Internet, pornography, crime and terror can now be efficiently
manufactured by anyone. In an age of narcissistic fulfillment personal choice
and our duty to protect are no longer interdependent.I am more concerned with peoples’ freedom to
conceal and thus facilitate their personal – group vendettas, misdemeanors and
indiscretions through the electronic media than I am worried about the
potential for government to abuse our personal electronic information.If you have something to be ashamed of don’t
put it on record. The communications
age has been a blessing to the narcissist whether they identify as mass killers
or terrorists. Society is acclimatizing
to a decremental loss in our security.But
people who are isolated from electronic communication are less likely to succeed
in hurting others.On the other side of
the information paradigm the proper controls must be maintained to secure the
protection of personal, benign information.

The
social media have become a wickedly efficient resource for abusing and inciting
violence across the globe in millions of postings and comments that are created
every day.It is as effortless to lie
as it is to tell the truth and because reality and fiction are easily
manipulated the electronic media are no longer, if they were ever, a vehicle for
educating us towards achieving a just society.

Basic
human rights can never be geographically variable, historically justified or
culturally insignificant; not in the name of multiculturalism nor in the name
of political correctness. According to Wikipedia, the latest human rights fad (called
‘Intersectionality’) involves “the study of overlapping
or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination
or discrimination”.If words such as
‘integrity’ and ‘ethics’ are to have any meaning at all they have to be applied
in equal measure. In an open ethical system intersectionality is therefore
nonsense because each part of our identity is separate and as such, it cannot
be interpreted hierarchically nor can it become conditioned on someone else’s
interpretation of how we should interact with the different layers of our
identity.When human rights become
politicized they are no more than a battle of wills for a newer form of
discrimination, domination and oppression.Communication becomes essentially unilateral and fetishistic.

China is the
global sweatshop for the Western worlds’ cheap consumer products (as well as
the source of most of our counterfeit products).Instead of crying crocodile tears for the
poor foreign worker the Western World could solve its unemployment problems but
it would cost each of us thousands of pounds, dollars or Euros extra, every
year, by returning more expensive production to western nations from China (and elsewhere).It would be the ethical and equitable thing
to do so.We keep quiet about Chinese
human rights. We negotiate them away for our material comfort.

We
should be questioning the Arab world about its treatment of women and children,
minorities; its oppression of its workers; its colonial history and its
slave-owning present.We should boycott
all goods made in Pakistan
and not just for its sweatshops but also for its inter-generational support for
terrorism.Saudi Arabia should be an
international pariah. It has provided some 100,000 million dollars in aid to
Islamist institutions over the last quarter of a century and yet without its
oil we would need to find a cleaner, more efficient means of meeting our energy
requirements. But we keep quiet about Arab human rights violations. Left and
Right negotiate away their protection
for our material comfort.

Warm
feelings of self-righteous anger have to be universal to be principled unless
they are the product of selectively chosen, ethically fascist targeting.

We
are living in an age of fear and irrationality where those who create that fear
hold sway over us – see how easy it is to do nothing about North Korea
even as it enslaves its own citizens and threatens nuclear annihilation against
its American rival.

According
to the United Nations, between March 2011 and August 2015 250,000 people were
killed in the Syrian Civil War.Other
estimates place the number of dead men, women and children at 350,000.How many deaths were there in the
Arab-Israeli conflict between 1920 and 2015? Some 115,000 people died.In 2015 Switzerland called a meeting of the
Geneva Convention for only the third time in its history.The UK,
France, Germany and another 123 signatory states to the
Fourth Geneva Convention assembled in order to condemn Israel.The Fourth Geneva Convention concerns itself
with the protection of civilian persons in time of war.Israel stood alone in the dock on
all three occasions.Make sense? Of
course it doesn’t.Sudan, Bangladesh,
Indonesia and Brazil
are just four of the dozens of conflict nations that have produced acts of
genocide since the end of World War 2. Syria is almost a side-show to what
has become a tragic litany of intentionally ignored blood letting. So if Israel
is not there to be periodically pilloried the UN stands for nothing other than
its own corpulent, self-congratulatory but essentially meaningless existence.
Under those conditions, the United Nations Organisation exists only to serve
its delegates with an endless merry go-round of pork barrel political
extravaganzas.The UN is nothing save
political theatre as tragic farce.UN
activities cost a few Western nations some 40,000 million dollars annually.How else to justify doing nothing most of the
time against the most heinous crimes committed in plain view unless there is an
Israel
to obsess about to the exclusion of everything else?

Human
Rights are a geographically variable commodity because we live in a political
world.Our politicians and academics,
our journalists and our charity workers, our bureaucrats and our social
activists are human beings.They are
prejudiced, racist, and guided by ego. We give them credit for altruism when their endeavors
are inevitably driven by power and greed.What frightens them most are controls that limit their freedom and if limiting
ours helps them to keep theirs, they will embrace populism, incitement and
selective censorship to do so.

The
only thing protecting us from them is that we do not keep quiet when we feel
threatened by their excesses. But we are losing that fight too because it is
easy to be selective about what is important to us while ignoring the ever
spreading injustice that results from equalities unequal application.

Cologne was not a
New Years Eve aberration. It was a symptom of our accelerating decline.